


One Of Those Things

by akathecentimetre



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: First Time, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-10
Updated: 2013-11-10
Packaged: 2018-01-01 01:05:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1038508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akathecentimetre/pseuds/akathecentimetre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jumps off from, and is heavily influenced by, the conversation in the convent at the end of <i>The Breaking Point</i>. Lipton thinks he has Speirs figured out, but the feeling apparently isn’t mutual, and more needs to be known – or do they already know everything?</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Of Those Things

Lipton didn’t have too much time to digest his conversation with Speirs in the convent, or what he’d said about Lip and the men, before he was on the move again. There was work to be done, there was always work to be done – billeting the men in the cells of the convent, for example, making sure the men who needed treatment for frostbite were getting it, and organizing some sort of patrol either from Easy or from Dog, for example, and that kept him busy until the invitation came down from HQ that a sort of dinner was being thrown for the officers the battalion to toast their successful action.

Speirs just grunted when he heard, and a few of the men who were nearby, mainly egged on by PeeWee, shared a few jokes at the expense of the higher-ups waiting for them, stilling only when Lipton raised an eyebrow and made eyes at Speirs’ back, chuckling a little when the men shut up so fast it was as if they were actually afraid of being on the end of a machine gun and the fearsome temper of the apparent Killing Machine that was Ronald Speirs.

Lipton was – there was no denying it, and it didn’t make him angry – the company’s mother hen, he knew that. Speirs, on the other hand, was the cowboy – not the one flashing megawatt smiles at pinup girls or riding the rodeo, but the one who would sleep out in the open and calmly shoot rattlesnakes when they nested in his boots, who would kill his own horse if need be, and would know just what tiny cave to lead any sobbing soft-palmed friend into to find the merest trickle of water, who didn’t give a damn what he looked like and measured men on balls. Next to him, Lip felt like the knock-kneed, spectacle-wearing son of an alcoholic Puritan minister, if that meant anything at all. And he knew it showed, so despite the respect he had from the men (or at least hoped he had), he wasn’t going to stop taking advantage of Speirs’ reputation, as well as his expertise – because there was no denying, not after Foy, that goddamn but he had expertise at command.

Someone managed to find dress jackets and pants for them, at least, and ties, and so they walked to the Battalion Headquarters with a veneer of respectability on top of their ragged boots and blackened shirts. ‘Headquarters’ turned out to be a bombed-out building in Rachamps, nothing more, but there was a fire, and a table laid with rations brought (or rather ‘borrowed’, Nixon informed them with a wink) from a General’s store. Lip’s toes even started to defrost, and he was comfortable, giving an informal report to Winters on the morale of the men now that they had real beds, when he noticed Speirs watching him.

It wasn’t as if his superior officer was being menacing – just watching him, a slight tilt to his head and his eyes fractionally narrowed, as though trying to figure out a puzzle which had more than one piece missing. Lipton looked away, continued talking, but as soon as Winters’s attention was otherwise engaged, his eyes drifted away from the cold spam on his plate and back up to Speirs, his straight jawline and unwavering gaze. He started to become conscious, both of his appearance and of his exhaustion, knowing that Speirs, being a good officer, would notice the bags under his eyes that he’d seen in a cracked mirror at the convent, how his tie was messy and rumpled because his brain had been so fuddled from the cold and the fatigue that it had taken him four attempts to get the knot right, and even then it still felt too tight, restricting his breath.

After what felt like an unreasonably long time, Speirs looked away as though nothing of what he’d been doing had been unusual, and excused himself from the table to go outside – through a broken window Lip could see him waving off a sentry and then lighting a cigarette, the small dot of red light flaring in and out amongst his white breath in the freezing air. The meal ended, and all the officers were dismissed, while he was still out there, and Winters pulled Lipton aside before he went out the door.

“When’s the last time you slept, lieutenant?” Dick asked calmly – Lip almost corrected him before he remembered that yes, he’d been promoted, with the new additions to his uniform feeling heavy and out of place.

“Uh,” he said, and then lowered his head a little. “I’m not sure myself, sir.”

“Speirs,” Winters barked, and Speirs came up to them, throwing his last butt away into the snow. “Make sure Lieutenant Lipton gets some sleep tonight. I don’t intend to let any more of Easy fall apart.”

“Sir.”

Lipton flushed a little as Winters left and Speirs grabbed him by the elbow, pulling them both onto the shrapnel- and snow-covered street that led back out of town. “Honestly, sir, I’m fine. I’ll be going to bed as soon as we reach the convent.”

“No,” Speirs said, and when Lip looked at him he was smirking. “If I know you, Lipton, you’ll check on all the men, order in supplies, arrange a sentry, thank the sisters for the umpteenth time, and _then_ go to bed. I intend to make sure you do no such thing.”

“I would not,” Lipton muttered petulantly, letting the cold and the grip Speirs had on his arm get to him. “I’m perfectly aware of when I need sleep, sir.”

“I’ve no doubt you do,” Speirs said, and then he pulled Lipton’s whole arm over his shoulders, as though he thought Lip would fall over if he let go of him. “But you’d still do it. Which is one of the reasons I can’t quite figure you out, Lipton.”

Lipton was too tired to understand that statement, so he just let himself be dragged, and, though he knew he wasn’t supposed to, enjoying the feeling of Speirs’s warmth pressed up against him. “Yes, sir.”

It was a quiet walk back the rest of the way, and Lipton’s head slipped as they trudged on further and further down to one side until it met his shoulder – it was only when they were back in the convent, and pressed together in a small hallway as they made their way to their adjacent bedrooms (formerly cells for nuns, obviously), that his face was not in fact on his own shoulder but on Speirs’, and when he lifted it Speirs was looking at him again in the dark, the light of dim electric bulbs casting shadows on his lean face, and just like that, in a flash, Lip saw again the shadow cast by his helmet as he’d run back through the smoke and bullets, his face as impassive as it would be if he was back in the States and walking through a park. 

“I’m not gonna let you kill yourself, Lipton,” he said, quite calmly. “And that’s an end of it.”

“Why, sir?” Lipton mumbled, unable to say much else.

He wasn’t sure whether to feel panic, fear, surprise, or just numbness when Speirs’ head hovered closer still to his, and then, with another, almost curious tilt of his head, Speirs moved forward that last inch and pressed his lips to Lipton’s. At that single moment, such an act just meant more warmth, which was good, which he liked, and it all seemed to make such perfect sense. Whether Speirs really was just curious, or whether he was just that tired, he didn’t know – but it was comforting, so comforting, to be in his bedroom suddenly, to have someone with him, so close to him, even if this was _Speirs_ , after all, and he probably wasn’t thinking of anything but getting some sex to try and ‘figure out’ who Carwood Lipton was as he gasped for air on his back in the sheets and the zipper of his pants opened with a harsh crackle.

He’d jerked himself off before, a few times, when the woods were quiet enough from lack of mortars but still buzzing with the voices of men so he wouldn’t be heard, just to make sure everything still worked after Carentan – and it had, leaving him feeling incredibly pathetic in his gratitude to whatever fates had him on their roster. But this – this was different. This was an entirely different proposition, and he grabbed Speirs’s shoulder, tried to convey with a look everything he was thinking without seeming a fool, and not feeling like he’d succeeded at all.

Speirs stilled, and more than ever, with his shirt hanging off one shoulder and his tie askew like some debauched debutante’s rich lover, he reminded Lip of a big game cat about to pounce, a wild animal under just enough control to stalk and not charge.

“You really think shit like that matters?” he whispered, and then smirked. Lip could imagine everything else he wanted Speirs to say – _You think it matters to me? Hell, who cares. Just so long as it works. Shut the fuck up, Lip._

Hell, maybe Speirs really was thinking one or all of those things. But then, as Speirs threaded his hands through his hair and kissed him, hard, he found himself thinking that it didn’t really matter a damn, not at all.

*

It could never be love. They were never even naked before each other, a fact which Lip wasn’t sure whether to be glad of or disappointed in. At any rate, he knew beyond any shred of doubt that it wasn’t love. What he knew it was was protection, protection that became a need, an obsession, the need of a superior officer to inspire and of an inferior to insulate, and a very real, driving addiction to making sure neither of them, none of them, would let go of the threads tying them to reality.

Speirs wasn’t even gentle, but that didn’t matter either. Lip knew the marks wouldn’t fade before morning, that were it not for the fact they were all going to be bundled up in what was left of their winter gear, the men would have something new to talk about. And Lip wasn’t an idiot, he wasn’t naïf. He may not have been around the track himself, but he wasn’t stupid, and so he did what he thought was right when Speirs’s eyes were fully dilated, and he could hear nothing above the roaring in his ears but someone – probably himself – panting, and started to turn over and hold his breath.

And it was then, only then, for the first time, that Speirs surprised him.

A sharp, insistent hand grabbed him around the neck, and turned him firmly again so he was on his back. Speirs almost looked angry.

“What the fuck d’you think you’re doing, First Sergeant?” he murmured.

And then he pressed himself flush against Lip and kissed him again, and when he was finally clutching Speirs’s shoulders and ribs and crying out with his head forced back over the pillow, feeling his hips jar and shake, it was in the full knowledge that Speirs was still looking at him, was still watching, was right before him with his mouth on his neck and so fully _there_ that he couldn’t believe he had ever entertained the knowledge of anything being simply taken.

*

Afterwards, as Speirs sat at the end of the bed and smoked (not because of any post-lovemaking haze or fad, Lip knew, but for the simple necessity of the nicotine rush), Lip lifted himself up on his elbows and said, numbly, “I thought you said I wasn’t gonna be a first sergeant much longer.”

“Huh?”

“You called me First Sergeant. Just now.”

Speirs was still for a moment, and then he stood, grinding out the butt of his cigarette on the bedpost as he reached for his pants with his other hand. “So I did. I forgot.”

“You don’t forget things.”

“No. I don’t normally.” Speirs turned, his pants snugly on his hips but unbuttoned, and his grimy shirt, specked with blood and shell-torn earth, hanging about his neck. “Just one of those things you do to me, Lipton.”

_Just one of those things,_ Lip murmured to himself, after Speirs was gone and the bed was starting to cool around him, its frigid sheets still warmer than anything he had experienced around Bastogne and Foy.

_Yes, sir. Just one of those things you do._

**FIN**


End file.
